Dan Pashman: What about cornbread?

Stephen Satterfield: Cornbread. 

Dan Pashman: Does he put sugar in the cornbread?

Stephen Satterfield: Um, there is a little, but it's — I wouldn't say that it's sweet. 

Dan Pashman: Mm-hmm. 

Stephen Satterfield: Honestly, it's like Jiffy plus.

Dan Pashman: So he starts with a mix and then kind of gives it — puts his own spin on it.

Stephen Satterfield: Exactly. 

Dan Pashman: Got it. 

Stephen Satterfield: Exactly.

Dan Pashman: As I understand it, adding sugar to the cornbread is a controversial topic.

Stephen Satterfield: Um, I know it can be for some. I definitely prefer a more savory cornbread, myself. Gosh, I love cornbread. I have had it in people's homes, where it has been a little sweeter. I'm not mad at it. We did grow up with sugar in our grits and I know that offends people’s sensibilities wildly, but I was raised like that. Full disclosure.

Dan Pashman: Well, I'm not judging you.

Stephen Satterfield: No. Yeah, and you shouldn't judge. 

Dan Pashman: [LAUGHS] 

MUSIC 

Dan Pashman: This is The Sporkful, it's not for foodies it's for eaters. I'm Dan Pashman. Each week on our show we obsess about food to learn more about people. This is the third and final part of our series “By Us For Everyone”. It’s a look at how Black American food is represented in media, past and present, and how those portrayals change when Black people are in charge of them. 

Dan Pashman: For the best experience, I recommend listening to the previous episodes first, but you don’t have to. This one will still be good, I promise. In the first two parts of our series, we heard the stories of Black writers and editors who’ve worked to push portrayals of Black food beyond narrow soul food stereotypes. 

Dan Pashman: Today, we’re talking with Stephen Satterfield, whose aspirations cut across all kinds of food media, and all kinds of cuisines and cultures. You may know him from last year's Netflix series High on the Hog. He hosted the four-part documentary on Black foodways around the U.S. which just won a Peabody and was nominated for a James Beard Award. 

Dan Pashman: But Stephen's real baby is his company, Whetstone Media. It launched in 2016, and now publishes two print magazines and nine podcasts, with more projects on the way. It’s one of the only Black-owned food media companies in America today. But as successful as it is now, Stephen has had to overcome a lot of resistance along the way.He grew up in Georgia, his dad was the primary cook in the family. In addition to the Jiffy cornbread, his dad would make things like ...

Stephen Satterfield: fried fish, often fried catfish, fried chicken, hush puppies, golden brown perfection. 

Dan Pashman: Mm-hmm. 

Stephen Satterfield: Okay? And then in the kitchen, on the stove, we have macaroni and cheese, the best collard greens, potato salad, cole slaw, a lot of game too. He was — he really liked roasting Cornish hens.

Dan Pashman: Mm.

Stephen Satterfield: He definitely doesn't really color outside of those lines, but in the lane that he cooks in he's really quite good. 

Dan Pashman: So as part of this series we looked at the early days, in the heyday of Ebony magazine. 

Stephen Satterfield: Mm-hmm. 

Dan Pashman: And its role in Black food culture.

Stephen Satterfield:  Mm-hmm. 

Dan Pashman: Was Ebony around growing up? Was that 

Stephen Satterfield: Absolutely, Ebony and Jet. Those are the magazines that were actually in the homes of Black people. Right? So I'm reading Ebony and Jet at my grandmother's house, at my aunt's house. So yeah, those magazines influenced me deeply, I think in ways that are so ingrained as to almost like, not even be part of my consciousness. 

Dan Pashman: Like what? Is there something specific you can ...

Stephen Satterfield: The most important thing about it is just simply seeing Black people across various sectors of society. Everything from our business titans, to our athletes, our entertainers, our entrepreneurs, our models, even. You know, seeing Black women every month, that is not a thing that you were going to get outside of those magazines. I don't think we realized how good we had it with that media. 

Dan Pashman: Part of those magazines every month was also recipes. But Ebony and Jet weren’t the only places that helped form Stephen’s approach to food. He liked to watch Julia Child and Jacques Pepin, and he admired Martha Stewart's empire — that she'd expanded from food into other lifestyle businesses. But maybe the biggest influence on Stephen as he was getting to be a teenager was a friend's dad, Mr. Shu. 

Stephen Satterfield: He was like a very successful guy, a banker. We grew up in a very humble way. And so, you know, I was like this dude, you know, he's really on it. They were really into food and he was cooking from a Marcela Hassan cookbook. He's the person who really got me into wine at a young age. So I remember eating dinner at their house in Atlanta, and I was probably like maybe 16 or 17-years-old. Right before dinner, he went down into his basement, the cellar, and he was down there for like 15 minutes. And I was like, "Yo, what is this guy doing, guy?"

Dan Pashman: [LAUGHS] He was down there for so long agonizing over what we were going to drink. And I just remember thinking, whatever, he knows. Like it's a language and I want to learn that language. 

MUSIC 

Dan Pashman: But before learning that language, Stephen figured he should go to college. He says he wanted to get as far away from Atlanta as possible, he just wanted to be somewhere new and different. So he headed to Oregon. It took Stephen one semester to realize college wasn't for him, but he thought food was. So he enrolled in culinary school in Portland. 

Stephen Satterfield: I thought I was going to be a chef. Right. Cause I was watching the Food Network and I was doing my whole Jacques and Julia thing. But once I started learning about cooking for a living, I was like, this is not for me. 

[LAUGHING]

Dan Pashman: What was it about it?

Stephen Satterfield: It just felt like a food factory. 

Dan Pashman: Hmm.

Stephen Satterfield: I was working at this steakhouse in Portland. And the tickets are going crazy and …

Dan Pashman: Orders coming in one after the other.

Stephen Satterfield: One after — [MACHINE SOUND EFFECT]. Machines going crazy. And I like to plate my salads just so. I like to taste the dressing, and so cooking in a professional environment for me was just a very rude awakening.

Dan Pashman: Right. They basically prize speed and consistency. 

Stephen Satterfield: Yeah. 

Dan Pashman: They want you to do it fast and do it the same every time. And I feel like both of those characteristics, I gather, run counter to your whole personality.

Stephen Satterfield: You’ve gathered correctly.

Dan Pashman: [LAUGHS] Like you're a cerebral person. You like — you're pensive and you like to …

Stephen Satterfield: I go slow. 

Dan Pashman: Right. 

Stephen Satterfield: I do.

Dan Pashman: But you also like — you also like to be creative and there's not actually not — people think that the role, the job of a chef is this — you're like some artist. 

Stephen Satterfield: Mm-hmm. 

Dan Pashman: Who gets to be so creative. 

Stephen Satterfield: Mm-hmm. 

Dan Pashman: But before you get to that point, you get to spend 20 years doing the same damn thing over and over and over again.

Stephen Satterfield: That's a fact. Exactly. So I got hip to that quickly.

Dan Pashman: [LAUGHS]

Dan Pashman: But Stephen didn’t completely give up on culinary school right away. Instead he decided to try some of their other courses. The first one?

Stephen Satterfield: Introduction to Wine Studies by John Eliason. He was a very soft-spoken guy with short, white hair, who part-time was teaching at this culinary school in Portland, and part-time he was making Burgundian wines in the Willamette Valley, as like a garage winemaker. And I was very, very taken by this man. 

Dan Pashman: John Eliason taught Stephen about the concept of terroir, which is French for land. It’s the idea that any wine is deeply connected to the land it comes from.

Stephen Satterfield: He is the first person who helped me understand wine as an agricultural matter. And not just a product that was, in my mind, closely tied to the class. And once I started to see that it was just grapes, I felt, oh, I can ... I can get into this. 

Dan Pashman: Right. 

Stephen Satterfield: It's just grapes.

Dan Pashman: Well, I think there's something sort of magical about the idea that you can open a bottle of wine anywhere in the world. And when you open it, you are kind of turning a key and unlocking something that connects you to the time and place where those grapes were grown.

Stephen Satterfield: Totally. I love ... I love that place based story of wine.I know a lot about terroir is about marketing, of course, but, I think a great deal more of, it really is about how effectively the essence of that place was captured and expressed in the bottle.

MUSIC

Stephen Satterfield: I fell in love with wine. It is still the greatest love in my life. It's the thing that brings me the most joy to this day. 

Dan Pashman: And so you become a sommelier at age 21.

Stephen Satterfield: Mm-hmm. 

Dan Pashman: I won't ask how you passed all those wine certification tests before you were 21, Stephen.

Stephen Satterfield: They'll be no follow-up questions.

Dan Pashman: [LAUGHS]

MUSIC

Dan Pashman: However he did it, Stephen now had the piece of paper to prove he could talk wine with the best of ’em. From there, he started working as a sommelier in restaurants. But even as his love for wine deepened, other issues arose.

Stephen Satterfield: I got disillusioned is what happened. As a young Black man living in Portland, Oregon, after a couple years I just started to become so fatigued with the overwhelming whiteness and the homogeneity of the wine industry. Like I would go into trade tastings where there would be like, for real, like 300 people. In there, I would be the only Black person in there. And that was just mind blowing to me. Even going to a private school, you know, with the majority white kids, I had never been in a situation like that. When I was trying to explain this to my white friends, who were in the wine industry, I'm like, can you imagine a context in your life, a situation where you would be in a room with 300 Black people and feel comfortable just over there, swishing and sniffing? 

Dan Pashman: Right. [LAUGHS] 

Stephen Satterfield: Like, nah, you wouldn't. 

Dan Pashman: Right. 

Stephen Satterfield: And so I really just got burdened by that, Like I couldn't focus basically on wine in the same way. 

Dan Pashman: Around the time Stephen started feeling this way, he got an opportunity to go to South Africa to work with Black winemakers there. He had never been to Africa, but he saw it as a chance to work in wine without having to be the only Black person in the room. Pretty soon, he was on a plane. 

Stephen Satterfield: I learned a lot about apartheid actually through that experience. And all of the echoes and reverberations of the experience in South Africa, to my experience as a Black man from the south, Southern apartheid. The situation on the ground was grim. These families have been bound to the same land for many generations, 10, 20 generations with no ownership, no prospect of any work opportunities, any life outside of this land, living in squalor and being paid, not money, but with alcohol, creating another generation of children with alcohol dependencies, fetal alcohol syndrome. Again, grim stuff. And so one of the ways that the industry was set up there was around fragmentation in isolating information. You would have people who are specialists as a cellar hand, a specialist in the wine room, a specialist in the vineyard.

Dan Pashman: But they didn't want them talking to each other?

Stephen Satterfield: Exactly. Because then they couldn't put the whole thing together. 

Dan Pashman: Over the next few years Stephen made several trips to South Africa, usually staying for a few weeks at a time. As he learned about the situation there, all he could think about was the way wine people talked about wine. They claimed to care so much about origin and terroir, but they overlooked the real story of the people in those places.

Stephen Satterfield: We were living in this terroir fantasy land, where we were talking about every single element of the land, except for the fact that it was stolen. It's like, okay, that's not necessarily part of the tasting notes, I will grant you. But it is hard to take the framework seriously. We're doing this serious analysis around origin and history, and there's no commentary on the fact that the land that we are referencing has violent origins, or it was acquired in a way that was not ethical. And so, that just became too loud of a contradiction for me as a wine lover, as a young sommelier, and so I just wanted to talk about land. 

MUSIC

Stephen Satterfield: And so I started to just make media about these families about what was going on.

Dan Pashman: Stephen began taking the concept of terroir and applying it more broadly. Telling stories not just about the connection between land and wine, but between land and people.

Stephen Satterfield: And that unwittingly became my point of entry into media.

MUSIC

Dan Pashman: Stephen started a nonprofit to share these stories and to advocate for South African wine makers. He was already struggling to find funding when the Great Recession hit. In 2010, the organization disbanded.

Dan Pashman: Stephen soon got a job as a manager and sommelier at a San Francisco restaurant called Nopa. On the side, the restaurant supported Stephen's work as a storyteller. He wrote a blog for them called Nopalize, diving into the stories of some of the local farms that supplied the restaurant. He became even more captivated by these connections between people and food and culture, and the land they came from. 

Stephen Satterfield: I have an idea that I feel called to pursue. And so I go pursue it. It's just like, I can't really see not doing the thing. Even when I got hired at Nopa, I was hiring filmmakers, videographers. We were producing like a whole video series with our bar manager. They were just like, yo, this is a restaurant.

Dan Pashman: [LAUGHS]

Stephen Satterfield: You're running like a media company from our restaurant. You need to go do this in real life. 

Dan Pashman: Right, right.

MUSIC

Dan Pashman: Coming up, Stephen sets out to do it in real life, and it’s much harder than he expected. Stick around.

MUSIC

 

+++ BREAK +++

 

MUSIC 

Dan Pashman: Welcome back to The Sporkful, I'm Dan Pashman. Last week, in the second part of “By Us For Everyone”, I talk with my friend Nicole Taylor. We had Nicole on the show years ago when she had just written her first cookbook. She talked about struggling to get publishers interested as a Black author writing about more than soul food. Now she has a new Juneteenth cookbook out, and in the wake of George Floyd’s murder and an increased awareness of so many issues, selling this book went a lot better than the first one. But that fact has been hard for Nicole to accept.

CLIP (NICOLE TAYLOR): I know that my work is worthy. But I also know the killing of George Floyd happening crazily helped me. And it's a hard pill to swallow. It is a hard thing to think about as you are trying to produce a cookbook about joy. 

Dan Pashman: But Nicole persevered. And she says this cookbook is for anyone who wants to honor Juneteenth with a special meal.

CLIP (NICOLE TAYLOR): I am very deliberately speaking to Black people in the book, and that is a way of centering and honoring them. But that doesn't mean I didn't invite Dan to the cookout. [LAUGHS]

CLIP (DAN PASHMAN): Nicole, I'll come to your cookout anytime.

CLIP (NICOLE TAYLOR): I think you will have an invitation, Dan.

CLIP (DAN PASHMAN): Oh, I’m waiting for it. I'm ready. I'm ready.

CLIP (NICOLE TAYLOR): Don't bring the potato salad. 

CLIP (DAN PASHMAN): [LAUGHS] 

CLIP (NICOLE TAYLOR): You can bring a pasta salad. I’ll let you bring a pasta salad.

CLIP (DAN PASHMAN): All right, fair enough. Fair enough.

Dan Pashman: There are so many highlights to this conversation. Just please make sure you don't miss this episode with Nicole Taylor. It's up now, wherever you got this one. Thanks. Okay, back to Stephen Satterfield.

Dan Pashman: Stephen left Nopa in 2016, after they politely told him to go make an actual media company, not some side hustle at a restaurant. Soon, he was working on an ambitious new project: Whetstone. A whetstone is what you use to sharpen a knife, that's usually one of the first things a chef does when they enter the kitchen. And Stephen liked that idea of it being the first thing, the beginning of food, the origin point. Whetstone would be a print magazine with a mission, that idea of terroir and origin applied not to wine, but to so much more.

Stephen Satterfield: With Whetstone I wanted to show that the dynamics that spring forth from the land inform everything that we know about ourselves as humans. If we want to understand humans, community and culture, food and therefore land became the best analysis, the best framework to deepen my own understanding. And that was the thing with Whetstone that I was really clear that we could show these land connections from a cultural context all over the world. And so the case for Whetstone in the world just seems so obvious, you know? A food publication started by a Black man with deep knowledge and experience in the food space in various capacities, had connections all over the world. 

Dan Pashman: But would the case for Whetstone be as obvious to others? It was time to find out, because in order to get it off the ground, Stephen needed money.

Stephen Satterfield: I tried to do a crowdfunding campaign in 2016 and it was a Kickstarter. It did not go well. I literally didn't have a clue. I didn't know how hard it was going to be. It was — I would just feel like that person was so naive.

Dan Pashman: But I feel like you have to be naive to start something of the magnitude of Whetstone and to keep at it.

Stephen Satterfield: Totally. I mean, naive might actually be a polite word for my case.

Dan Pashman: [LAUGHS] Right. So what is it that you didn't know then?

Stephen Satterfield: That it was going to be impossible to do, almost impossible. I was pretty sure I could pull off making a magazine, but I didn't understand business. Right? I didn't understand even if I made something beautiful that didn't mean that I was going to be able to build a business around a beautiful artifact.

Dan Pashman: And so that Kickstarter went up and your goal was to raise $50,000. 

Stephen Satterfield: Mm-hmm. 

Dan Pashman: And what happened?

Stephen Satterfield: We raised maybe a fifth of that? We had to give all the money back, that was a devastating event. That wasn't even the worst of it. I came back the next year to do another crowdfunding campaign, that was with Indiegogo. This platform allows you to keep whatever you make, but all the people who were on the first ride, they didn't come back for the second ride. We were only able to raise like $4,000 the second time around. And so then I was just pissed, actually. Because there were some people that I knew who,` you know, we got you … blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then when they saw that the first one didn't happen, I felt like they were like, okay, well it's not really gonna happen. And so I was like, all right, this business might not work, but I'm about to ship this magazine. 

MUSIC 

Dan Pashman: Stephen found writers and photographers who offered to contribute for free for that first issue. He took the $4,000 he made with that second crowdfunding campaign, put a couple thousand more on a credit card, and used that money to print 400 copies of Whetstone, volume 1.

Stephen Satterfield: I just knew that there were other people out there that had a similar enough worldview that would value this work and that we could take it from there. I was also very driven by the fact that, it kept failing. There was no fanfare for the reception of Whetstone into the world. It was born into a world of indifference. And I guess I just couldn't accept that. And I went door to door retail, like old school, like a paper boy. 

Dan Pashman: Going where? Where was this?

Stephen Satterfield: Just like in San Francisco. 

Dan Pashman: Bookshops?

Stephen Satterfield: Bookshops. 

Dan Pashman: Magazine shops. 

Stephen Satterfield: Yeah. 

Dan Pashman: You're just trying to like, get them to put a few on the shelf.

Stephen Satterfield: Yeah. And it worked. You know, we were able to sell out of the first magazine. It was also beautiful. And we just sort of grew our own momentum from there.

MUSIC 

Dan Pashman: That first issue came out in 2017. It included a history of the Cavendish banana and its imminent decline, and a tour of the markets of Marrakech. There’s an essay by Stephen about corn and his travels in Mexico, and an article that discusses the potential of a specific coffee bean as an engine of social change. All with striking photography, a mix of sweeping landscapes and powerful close ups.

Dan Pashman: In the next few years, Whetstone published one or two magazines a year. Revenue tripled annually. The business became profitable. Stephen began working to transform it from a magazine into a media company. Whetstone launched a podcast and a blog, and a series of video dispatches from around the world. But to really achieve his goals, Stephen still needed more money. 

Dan Pashman: In the first four years of the company’s existence, Stephen estimates he had 150 meetings with potential investors. But even though the business was growing and even when it became profitable, not a single one would help fund his work.

Stephen Satterfield: It's just a situation where the thinking in the angel investor and venture capital circle is very limited. 

Dan Pashman: According to Crunchbase, which collects funding data on private companies, only about one percent of all venture capital invested in the U.S. in the first half of last year went to Black founders. When you talk about Black women, it’s one third of one percent. And those numbers are increases from previous years.

Stephen Satterfield: So what are we actually talking about? We're talking about access to capital being available for people who look exactly the same. And everybody else has to get in where you fit in.

Dan Pashman: This was playing out for Stephen over and over again, but always behind closed doors. Then, in the summer of 2020, it became public. Against the backdrop of the pandemic and racial justice protests across the country, the James Beard Awards did a series of virtual discussions about race. One of these talks featured John T. Edge, a white man who was the director of the Southern Foodways Alliance at the time. The S.F.A. documents and tells stories of southern food with films, podcasts, and a magazine. As the head of the organization for 20-plus years, John T. raised money and had a lot of power over which stories got told and by whom.

Dan Pashman: The other featured panelist was the Nigerian-American chef Tunde Wey. You’ll hear Tunde first in this clip, making the case that a big magazine publisher like Conde Nast should invest in Black-owned companies, like Whetstone.

CLIP (TUNDE WEY): I’m talking about, to be very specific, the company that owns Conde Nast investing say 10 million dollars in a startup that is owned by Stephen Satterfield, Whetstone Media. Like take the money, take $10 million and invest it in this Black man’s company. 

CLIP (JOHN T. EDGE): Tunde, would you argue that beyond the debt that perhaps Conde Nast perhaps owes, would you say that backing Whetstone is a good business decision, too?

Dan Pashman: Stephen had given a talk at the S.F.A. symposium. He knews John T. When Stephen heard this comment, he heard echoes of those investor conversations — white people in positions of power skeptical that Whetstone could succeed. 

Stephen Satterfield: He just slipped. [LAUGHS] He wasn’t supposed to say the quiet part. That’s the thing. That’s the issue. You know? He said what I just told you the investors were saying. They don’t have a point of reference for it. So when John T., who is an insider at the institution, he’s the money man, he’s built the program up, all the years of goodwill. Well earned too, by the way. The reason that that situation was so difficult for me is because I looked up to him. You know what I'm saying? And so, I was like, yo, If I can’t even get the white men that I know to go up for me in public, what does that mean? 

Dan Pashman: The panel discussion brought long festering frustrations with John T.’s leadership out into the open. In the weeks that followed, many pointed to the fact that the staff of the S.F.A. was almost entirely white, despite the foundational role Black people have always played in southern foodways. People including Osayi Endolyn, who you’ve heard on this show, and Nicole Taylor, who I talked with last week, called for him to resign. Stephen did, too. John T. ultimately relinquished his position and is now listed as Founding Director on the S.F.A.’s website. Two people have taken over his duties, both white women.

Dan Pashman: While Stephen’s fundraising efforts continued, in 2019, he got a big break. He was tapped to be the host of a Netflix series called High on the Hog, based on the seminal book by Dr. Jessica B. Harris. Each episode of the documentary series explores a different place in America and how the Black people in that place have shaped the food and the culture. Stephen had always had a clear vision for his work. Hosting a TV show wasn’t part of it. And this show? 

Stephen Satterfield: The idea that a show like that could get made was already kind of, even for me, at the outer edges of my imagination, and I didn't want to be famous, but I did understand that I needed more amplification. Right? I needed that distribution. And the simplest way for me to get there, I thought would be on the talent side.

Dan Pashman: In other words, Stephen thought that if he was the host of a hit show on Netflix, it would help him grow Whetstone, make it more visible. It might even help him raise money. When he got the job, he was in shock.

Stephen Satterfield: I just couldn't believe that someone like me, who had, really in my — like never had a break, you know, always kind of been on the outside of everything. I was just like, holy shit. Like they're about to let me in the front door. 

Dan Pashman: For Stephen, the process of making High on the Hog was profound. It was shot, directed, edited, beginning to end, by an almost entirely Black crew.

Stephen Satterfield: That is really, to me, the most magical part of the show. And I think it's so palpable, too. 

Dan Pashman: And in what way? Like to the average viewer, what would they … 

Stephen Satterfield: But here's the thing, the average viewer, I don't know what the average viewer felt. The average Black viewer, I know felt, “Oh, they made this show for us. This is where we started off.” You feel me? That communication of who this work was for. For us? Oh, we all heard that. As you know, the stuff that gets left on the so-called cutting room floor, because why? We have all of these gatekeepers in media, who function as interpreters. So, maybe something that seems irrelevant or awkward to you, as the editor, feels very important and poignant and like a tender moment that must be included, right, of you're a Black editor.

Dan Pashman: So High on the Hog is a huge success. It gets a ton of critical acclaim. It's gone on to win a Peabody and get nominated for a James Beard award. Congratulations. 

Stephen Satterfield: Thank you. It's wild. 

Dan Pashman: And so on the heels of the success of High on the Hog, you announced Whetstone Radio Collective.

Stephen Satterfield: Mm-hmm. 

Dan Pashman: Your goal is to launch 12 podcasts over the coming months and you announce another crowdfunding campaign, this time to raise $250,000.

Stephen Satterfield: I’m still trying to hit y'all for a lick. 

[LAUGHING] 

Stephen Satterfield: You're speaking of patterns that you've noticed over the years.

Dan Pashman: [LAUGHS] But, you have to feel that — yes, you fell on your face in 2016, but now this is 2021 and you're the star of a hit TV show. This time it's gonna work. 

Stephen Satterfield: It didn't. It's crazy. It didn't though. It maybe wasn't the best strategy in hindsight, like I don't have any managers or advisors, or anything like that. So maybe if I had those people, they would have said, maybe you don't want to do this right out of the gate. And people are just getting to know you ... blah, blah, blah. But I just felt like, yo, we're ready. Y'all just getting here, but I'm not just getting here. I've been waiting for this moment so I could do this thing that I've been trying to do all these years.

Dan Pashman: In the end they raised $115,000, which Stephen is quick to point out, is still good, even if it was well short of the goal. And Whetstone did launch a podcast network with it. But as Stephen says, $115,000 still isn’t much in the context of running an ambitious media company that wants to operate all over the world.

Dan Pashman: And there was another aspect to it. He was frustrated by having to keep pleading for money when he felt like he had proven himself. And when so many people were telling him how "brilliant" he was. Around this time, he shared some of these feelings on Instagram. I asked him to read part of the post: 

Stephen Satterfield: “A company like Whetstone, self-funded multi-platform profitable and Black owned remains a unicorn, just not in a conventional investment lexicon, just real life. In real life, until recently, we were the only Black-owned food publisher in the U.S. In real life, I watch other things get funded that add no value to real life. It regularly makes me feel like shit. But also, I use my rage to turn the page to the next chapter of getting after it. I feel gaslit getting called brilliant, and yet have never had my goals met.”

Dan Pashman: I was especially moved by that last line, “I feel gaslit getting called "brilliant" and yet have never had my goals met.” Can you unpack that for me? 

Stephen Satterfield: I don't think the word "brilliant" is a word that other people use or take lightly. That's a really intense thing to say to someone. “Hey, you're brilliant.” But it also really undermines the potency of the word when people's actions aren't moving in alignment with how they're describing you. 

Dan Pashman: Right. They're calling you brilliant, but they're not donating to the campaign. 

Stephen Satterfield: Yeah and it’s like, if you want the work that I'm making to have a place in the world, that lip service isn't actually going to cover it. The only thing that I'm asking for is can y'all help keep the lights on? Can you put some in the collection tray? And then when people don't do that, but then they want to say, “Oh, your work is amazing,” no, that is enraging to me.

MUSIC

Dan Pashman: As he's always done, Stephen kept at it. He met with more potential investors, kept on working to grow Whetstone. Eventually, he connected with a venture capital fund called Supply Change, run by two women named Noramay Cadena and Shayna Harris. 

Stephen Satterfield: I had been on the phone with them for months and months. They had a relatively new fund where they wanted to focus on under represented founders in the food space. They were the first ones to put money up. So that actually felt like validation, cause they're the first people who really invested in me. 

Dan Pashman: The tide finally seemed to be shifting. Whetstone also got investment from Participant Media, and it all added up to a big announcement about their fundraising.

Stephen Satterfield: Got our first million dollars. 

Dan Pashman: [LAUGHS] How did that feel? 

Stephen Satterfield: Incredible. That was an amazing thing. 

Dan Pashman: So when you finally closed your first big round of funding, your first major investment, what did you indulge in to celebrate?

Stephen Satterfield: Gosh, I don't even know, man. I was so tired. I mean, it took me like a year, you know?

Dan Pashman: Right.

Stephen Satterfield: And I was relieved more than anything, because it allowed us to stay on this path, where our story could continue to be a growth story. 

MUSIC 

Dan Pashman: Last month, Whetstone published the 9th issue of their magazine. They just launched a second magazine called Rasa, focused on South Asia. The Whetstone Radio Collective now includes 9 podcasts with more coming. And they debuted a line of clothing made by artisans in Oaxaca, Mexico. Stephen also signed a deal to write a book called Black Terroir, expanding on the themes he covers in his other work.

Dan Pashman: Whetstone has joined the legacy of Black-owned media companies in America. In some ways, of course, it’s very different from predecessors, like Ebony. But there are similarities. Both began with a vision and a conviction that there were other people out there who wanted to see it become a reality. 

Dan Pashman: I'm not sure if you're familiar with John H. Johnson. He was the founder and publisher of Ebony. 

Stephen Satterfield: Mm-hmm, 

Dan Pashman: He wrote sort of a mission statement about Ebony. This is in 1975, and I'd love to ask you to read this.

Stephen Satterfield: “Ebony was founded to provide positive images for Blacks in a world of negative images and non-images. It was founded to project all dimensions of the Black personality in a world saturated with stereotypes. Our mission is to tell Black America, and the world, what Black America is thinking, doing, saying, feeling, and demanding. Our mission is to tell it not only like it is, but also like it was, and like it must be.”

Dan Pashman: What are your thoughts reading that from a fellow magazine, founder and publisher?

Stephen Satterfield: [LAUGHS] I love it. It's deep, you know? It's deep for me. When I started Whetstone, we were the only Black-owned food publisher in the country. That was a really big deal. I guess, I just feel very motivated and overwhelmed to be in that legacy.

Dan Pashman: It's also just a sort of a lot to process that a magazine that was launched in 1945, and he's writing this in 1975, and here we are in 2022, and a lot has changed, but there's also some of this mission that has yet to be.

Stephen Satterfield: A hundred percent. Yeah, I think that's really what I am sitting with, you know, is how relevant every single word still is. How being a Black publisher in 2022, that's out here getting it. Like that really matters, you know? There're still not too many of us out here. It just refocuses me, my work, and it puts me in my place. It's really humbling. There's so much privilege to be part of this legacy.

Dan Pashman: So with this new investment, you said it sort of gave you an opportunity to look to the future.

Stephen Satterfield: Mm-hmm. 

Dan Pashman: You talked earlier about how, when you were a kid, Ebony was the magazine that was always around. 

Stephen Satterfield: Mm-hmm.

Dan Pashman: It was always at your aunt's house or your grandmother's house. Have you ever imagined the day when Whetstone could be that magazine? 

Stephen Satterfield: I actually haven't imagined that. I think I need to imagine that more often actually. And I'm more just, like, stunned when someone has it on their table instead.

Dan Pashman: [LAUGHS]

Stephen Satterfield: As a leader, you know, I have had to move from a kind of survival deficit story into a story of confidence and success. And so I'm having to reconstruct a new kind of identity that's not about never having my goals met and what does it mean for me to lead from a position of success? I don't know. I'm trying to find out.

Dan Pashman: And how much do you think that that transition for you is representative of a larger transition for Black Americans working in food media?

Stephen Satterfield: Yeah, I mean, I'm reluctant to try to speak for the up-and-comers, I guess, but it's clearly a much more fertile environment and time than it's ever been. I guess when I'm thinking of Black creators in food now, they don't really have to talk about their Blackness in the same way. And that's how I know that we're actually getting a little bit closer. They don't have to be soul food chefs. But I also know that these things are fleeting, because ultimately, the amplification and the distribution, we’re only a algorithm or a conflict away from these channels being disrupted and so I don't want Black people, my people, whoever, to be complacent in the way that we're getting to create right now and be able to find audience. I want us to build community offline and in real life so that when these tools fail us, or change their mind, or get acquired, the storytelling can live. 

MUSIC 

Dan Pashman: That’s Stephen Satterfield, founder of Whetstone Media and host of Netflix’s High on the Hog. You can subscribe to Whetstone Magazine at whetstonemagazine.com and find Whetstone’s podcasts wherever you got this one.

Dan Pashman: This concludes our series “By Us For Everyone”. We hope you’ll check out the other episodes, if you haven’t already. The first episode is called "The Table Freda Built", and the second one is called "Nicole Taylor Busted Through The Door Of Food Media". They’re in your feed right now.

Dan Pashman: Quick a bit of exciting news before I sign off. I’m doing our first Sporkful live show in New York since before covid, that’s coming up July 20th at the Bell House in Brooklyn. I’ll be chatting with Kim Pham from Omsom and Chitra Agrawal from Brooklyn Delhi. We’ll have food samples and goodies for sale, including Banza and Sfoglini cascatelli! Get your tickets for that show right now before they're gone. Go to sporkful.com/live.